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The Eisenhower administration's intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of "counterrevolution" to trace the Eisenhower administration's efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite. Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington's efforts to roll back "communism" in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War represented in reality a short-term strategy to protect core American interests from the rising tide of Third World nationalism.
After World War II, a powerful conviction took hold among American intellectuals and policymakers: that the United States could profoundly accelerate and ultimately direct the development of the decolonizing world, serving as a modernizing force around the globe. By accelerating economic growth, promoting agricultural expansion, and encouraging the rise of enlightened elites, they hoped to link development with security, preventing revolutions and rapidly creating liberal, capitalist states. In The Right Kind of Revolution, Michael E. Latham explores the role of modernization and development in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War through the present. The modernization project rarely ...
An illustration of how indigenous and non-indigenous actors deployed concepts of time in their conflicts over race and modernity in postcolonial Guatemala.
An ambitious revisionist history of the modern Middle East What Really Went Wrong offers a fresh and incisive assessment of American foreign policy’s impact on the history and politics of the modern Middle East. Looking at flashpoints in Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese history, Fawaz A. Gerges shows how postwar U.S. leaders made a devil’s pact with potentates, autocrats, and strongmen around the world. Washington sought to tame assertive nationalists and to protect repressive Middle Eastern regimes in return for compliance with American hegemonic designs and uninterrupted flows of cheap oil. The book takes a counterfactual approach, asking readers to consider how the political tr...
The early modern period (c. 1500OCo1800) of world history is characterized by the establishment and aggressive expansion of European empires, and warfare between imperial powers and indigenous peoples was a central component of the quest for global dominance. From the Portuguese in Africa to the Russians and Ottomans in Central Asia, empire builders could not avoid military interactions with native populations, and many discovered that imperial expansion was impossible without the cooperation, and, in some cases, alliances with the natives they encountered in the new worlds they sought to rule. Empires and Indigenes is a sweeping examination of how intercultural interactions between European...
Globalization has challenged taken-for-granted relationships of rule in local, regional, national, and international settings. This unsettling of legitimacy raises questions. Under what conditions do individuals and communities accept globalized decision making as legitimate? And what political practices do individuals and collectivities under globalization use to exercise autonomy? To answer these questions, the contributors to Unsettled Legitimacy explore the disruptions and reconfigurations of political authority that accompany globalization. Arguing that we live in an era in which political legitimacy at multiple scales of authority is under strain, they show that globalization has also created demands for regulation, security, and the protection of rights and expressions of individual and collective autonomy within and across multiple political and geographic spaces. Instead of offering simplistic arguments for or against global governance, enhanced democracy, or economic integration, the contributors provide a sophisticated examination of the complexities of legitimacy and autonomy in a globalizing world.
This book examines the history of nation-building during the era of decolonization and the Cold War, and on the more recent post-Cold War and post-9/11 pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as ‘collapsed’ or ‘failed’ states. In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era nation-building, or what is increasingly termed state-building, has taken on renewed salience, making it more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in historical perspective. Focusing on both historical and contemporary examples, the contributors explore a number of important themes that relate to ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ nation-building efforts from South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century. From Nation-Building to State-Building was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly and will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics and peace studies.
The dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations during the Cold War views the United States as all-powerful. That perspective, represented in the metaphor “talons of the eagle,” continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. The goal of this collection of essays is not to write the United States out of the picture but to explore the ways Latin American governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their own interests and perspectives. The book also challenges the tendency among scholars to see the Cold War as a simple clash of “left” and “right.” In various ways, several essays disassemble those categories and explore the complexities of the Cold War as it was experienced beneath the level of great-power relations.
Charts the Ottoman Empire's unique path to creating a realm of social life in which public opinion could be formed.
Globalization has challenged concepts such as local culture and cultural autonomy. And the rampant commodification of cultural products has challenged the way we define culture itself. Have these developments transformed the relationship between culture and autonomy? Have traditional notions of cultural autonomy been recast? This book showcases the work of scholars who employ a broad definition of culture to trace how issues of cultural autonomy have played out in various arenas, including literary criticism, indigenous societies, the Slow Food movement, and skateboarding culture. Although they focus on the marginalized issue of autonomy, they reveal that globalization has both limited as well as created new forms of cultural autonomy.